Russia’s state statistics agency, Rosstat, recorded 393,881 to 450,100 dead on Russia’s side in the war through late August, two hacker groups that broke into its systems, Cyber Partisans and Silent Crow, claim. Their figures cannot be independently verified. They sit well above the number of dead soldiers journalists have named from public sources, and below expert estimates of the real toll.

Russia does not publish its war dead, so every count has been pieced together from outside, from obituaries and graves or from Ukraine’s battlefield estimates. Records kept inside the Russian state offer a rare check on those numbers. The check comes as Russia’s losses keep climbing: October was its costliest month of the full-scale war by Ukraine’s count, while each square kilometer it takes costs it more soldiers than before.

Ukraine’s General Staff puts Russia’s killed and wounded at about 1.6 million, and it counted 16,130 in the first week of November alone, its highest weekly figure of the war.

Two hacker groups, two counts from the same records

Rosstat’s website went down on the night of 1 November. Belarusian hacker group Cyber Partisans says it took about 10 terabytes of data in what its spokesperson Zmitser Shchyhelski called a strategic cyber operation, Radio Liberty’s Belarusian service Svaboda reported. Silent Crow, another hacker group, published its own count from the same records.

The Cyber Partisans’ count, at least 393,881 dead on Russia’s side from 2022 to 27 August 2026, includes only records whose cause of death names war. These are the international disease codes for operations of war and their consequences, or a cause written out as combat.

Silent Crow arrives at 450,100 through 28 August, its own site shows. It casts a wider net, adding 14,160 non-combat deaths of servicemen and 13,671 people registered in Russia who died in occupied territory with no cause given. More than half of the dead whose place of death is recorded died in Russian-occupied parts of Donetsk Oblast.

Both counts cover only deaths that entered Russia’s civil registries. The wounded, the missing, and foreign mercenaries are not in them. The war code does not separate soldiers from civilians, Silent Crow notes, so a share of the dead are residents of shelled towns, though 99.4% of those it counted are men.

How the hackers’ counts compare with other tallies

Working with volunteers and Russian outlet Mediazona, the BBC Russian Service has named 285,023 Russian soldiers killed in the full-scale invasion as of 30 October. Experts estimate its list captures 45% to 55% of the dead, putting the real toll at 518,224 to 633,384, the BBC said.

Cyber Partisans argue their figure fits Ukraine’s far larger count of Russian losses. Total losses, which include the wounded, disabled, and missing, usually run three to five times the number of dead, the group noted.